There is a t-shirt that says "Born in Maine, Living in Exile." I lived in "exile" (actually a very nice place) for 32 years, and returned to Maine in 2005. That's not necessarily what all this is about, just the only title I could think of at the time.

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Coming in Like a Lion

Here we go again! The snow started, as predicted, about 10 pm last night. At the time, I was trudging around the house trying to corral the dog. Rusty "escaped" when I fell in the snow. Fortunately, he was so interested in smelling the snow around the house (it had been a sunny day and squirrels were out) and looking through the basement windows to see the cat, that I was eventually able to lure him with a treat and grab his leash again.

It's still coming down; somewhere between 4 and 8 inches are predicted, but on the actual coastline and offshore islands there may be rain instead. Onkel Hankie Pants' performance this evening in Twelve Angry Men and Women has already been cancelled. After years of living in a major metropolitan area, it's almost culture shock to live where winter weather cancellations are so common. In City of Lakes, snow days were a rare occurrence; a former Governor who was born in New Jersey got a lot of kidding when he cancelled school for the whole state twice in one season because of extreme cold. When the girls went to Rudy Perpich's Good Idea (aka High School for the Terminally Artistic), there were more cancellations because many of the metro-area students drove long distances to school. Our kids usually listened wistfully to the long list of school cancellations and "two hours late, no morning kindergarten" announcements from the more rural areas of Minnesota and western Wisconsin. Church was never, ever cancelled, although once we cancelled the Christmas caroling party. But here, where many people have to wait for their driveways to be plowed out before they can even think of getting on the road, cancellations and postponements are a way of life in winter. "Life in the slow lane" is one of our t-shirt slogans; the constant reminders that we are not fully in charge, that we must pay attention to the weather and that human plans must sometimes be cancelled because of it, may have something to do with that. It's humbling.

My daily email update from the Washington Post this morning mentioned that "meteorological winter" is officially over. That's not just in the DC area, but here as well. The ten-day forecast has a lot of temperatures in the low 40s and no further snowstorms, just some "wintry mix." There is the old saw about March coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb, and the record high for March 31 here is 73 degrees F. It could happen again! I hope so. We are all getting tired of this. Here are some more photos I took out the front door this morning:

Get out the brushes and scrapers! We are so fortunate to have a garage (with an automatic door opener! connected to the basement!), which we pretty much lived without for all the years in Minnesota. Our apartment-dwelling neighbors are not so lucky.

This photo is of a few branches from our Christmas tree that remained on the (unused) front steps. Those steps were almost clear yesterday, but here they are being covered with snow again. This was taken about 2 hours ago, and you can hardly see these now for the snow. I am sorry to say that the trees and the parts we cut off are also still in the yard -- bad weather and procrastination made us miss the town pickup. No matter, OHP will saw them up after the snow goes and take them back to our woods to make humus.

It's not a good day to drive to Orr's Island for the church breakfast, so I'd better start cooking if I want there to be any. OHP is busy sending out our Valentine letters, which replace the 2007 Christmas letters we didn't get done. What's your weather like today?

Songbird, I sort of doubt they had the breakfast, but the church doesn't seem to have a phone number and going there would be the kind of "recreational driving" that OHP has sworn not to do on days like this, so instead we had sausages from Bisson's, scrambled eggs, and toasted rosemary bread from Borealis Breads. And with the play cancelled, OHP and I will be able to watch some episodes of Foyle's War that I've had out from Netflix far too long, waiting for an evening we can both watch. As my grandmother used to say, "There's no great loss without some small gain."